Stories of Childhood

Stories of Childhood

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stories of Childhood, by Various This
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Title: Stories of Childhood
Author: Various
Editor: Rossiter Johnson
Release Date: May 29, 2005 [EBook #15933]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STORIES
OF CHILDHOOD ***

Produced by Ron Swanson

LITTLE CLASSICS EDITED BY ROSSITER JOHNSON
STORIES OF CHILDHOOD
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1914
COPYRIGHT, 1875, BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & Co. ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
CONTENTS.
A DOG OF FLANDERS . . . . . . . . . . _Louisa de la Rame (Ouida)_

THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER . . . . . John Ruskin THE
LADY OF SHALOTT . . . . . . . . . Elizabeth Stuart Phelps MARJORIE
FLEMING . . . . . . . . . . . _John Brown, M.D._
LITTLE JAKEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Mrs. S.H. DeKroyft_
THE LOST CHILD . . . . . . . . . . . . Henry Kingsley GOODY
GRACIOUS! AND THE FORGET-ME-NOT John Neal A FADED
LEAF OF HISTORY . . . . . . . Rebecca Harding Davis A CHILD'S
DREAM OF A STAR . . . . . . Charles Dickens * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A DOG OF FLANDERS.
BY OUIDA
Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.
They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was a
little Ardennois,--Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the
same age by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other was
already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days; both were
orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had
been the beginning of the tie between them, their first bond of
sympathy; and it had strengthened day by day, and had grown with
their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they loved one another very
greatly.
Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little village,--a Flemish
village a league from Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture and
corn-lands, with long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the
breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran through it. It had about
a score of houses and homesteads, with shutters of bright green or
sky-blue, and roofs rose-red or black and white, and walls whitewashed
until they shone in the sun like snow. In the centre of the village stood a
windmill, placed on a little moss-grown slope; it was a landmark to all
the level country round. It had once been painted scarlet, sails and all,
but that had been in its infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it
had ground wheat for the soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy
brown, tanned by wind and weather. It went queerly by fits and starts,
as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints from age, but it served the
whole neighborhood, which would have thought it almost as impious to
carry grain elsewhere, as to attend any other religious service than the

mass that was performed at the altar of the little old gray church, with
its conical steeple, which stood opposite to it, and whose single bell
rang morning, noon, and night with that strange, subdued, hollow
sadness which every bell that hangs in the Low Countries seems to gain
as an integral part of its melody.
Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth
upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut
on the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in
the northeast, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and
spreading corn that stretched away from them like a tideless,
changeless sea. It was the hut of a very old man, of a very poor
man,--of old Jehan Daas, who in his time had been a soldier, and who
remembered the wars that had trampled the country as oxen tread down
the furrows, and who had brought from his service nothing except a
wound, which had made him a cripple.
When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty, his daughter had died
in the Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and